November 2010

The Beowulf project pioneered the use of off-the-shelf, commodity computers running open source operating systems for high-performance computing. Beowulf clusters have a lower purchase price and better performance than SMP systems…

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution,…

Researchers in Germany have successfully fabricated a rudimentary quantum computing hybrid system that may allow integration of multi-qubit systems on a single micrometer-sized chip for future quantum computers.

A Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya research team has developed a way to locate available parking spaces using optical and magnetic sensors. The researchers plan to make the information available on luminous panels in public…

Google Wave's developers have submitted the software to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), making it a candidate to become a Podling included in the Apache Incubator, ASF's preparation platform for open source projects.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is an Indian government body mandated with the task of assigning every single one of India's 1.2 billion citizens a Unique Identity number. No system in the world has handled…

The European Union, the United States, and NATO have approved a range of new plans to meet cyberdefense challenges. The European Commission has announced proposals to develop systems to make citizens and businesses more secure…

Nokia is developing a universal in-box that collects messages and updates from different smartphone applications and organizes them in one location so users can see everything at once. The in-box hold emails, texts, call logs…

Graduate students at Stanford University and Finland's Aalto University have created a prototype of a recyclable laptop that can be disassembled in about 30 seconds. The Bloom laptop is almost entirely made of components that…

The majority of spam messages come from a limited number of Internet service providers and countries, according to a study by researchers at Delft University of Technology and Michigan State University.

QualityHealth is a popular health Web site with more than 20 million registered users that offers online medical information and email newsletters on a variety of topics, including diabetes, allergies, asthma and arthritis…

Social networks pose a threat to the Web because they capture and reuse users' information rather than share it with other sites, says Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He says large social networking sites are silos of closed content that…

Developers of robots and computer-generated films face the difficult task of making their creations as human as possible without looking too human, a perceptual gap that experts call the uncanny valley.

IBM recently revealed details about a new storage architecture design that it says can double analytics processing speed. IBM says the architecture can convert terabytes of information into actionable insights twice as fast…

Virginia Tech researchers have launched a proof-of-concept study to develop highly connected computer systems that work in a wireless environment. The study is backed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Researchers working on Mahidol University's iThink2 project have developed a brain computer interface that controls electronic devices with brain signals and could help quadriplegic patients improve their quality of life.

The European Union will launch a project to build a single molecule processor chip. The Atomic Scale and Single Molecule Logic Gate Technologies project will establish a new process for making a complete molecular chip.

Peter Beckman, director of the DOE's Exascale Technology and Computing Institute, says the United States needs to make a sizable push to open up funding resources if the country is to have a chance of winning the race to build…